Conditioning Research

This is a superb video.  If you follow Todd Hargrove's blog this will not be new, but it is well presented. via BSMPG

This is interesting Presented by: Term Life Insurance Resource

Continuing the theme of keeping older brains healthy....I've had stuff before on how exercise increases insulin sensitivity (which we saw was a good thing) and how resistance training benefits older people.   Now this study which sees better brain performance in the elderly following intense exercise. Acute moderate exercise enhances compensatory brain activation in older adults.

This is an interesting looking study ( full text here ) Exercise training increases mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain These findings suggest that exercise training increases brain mitochondrial biogenesis, which may have important implications, not only with regard to fatigue, but also with respect to various central nervous system diseases and age-related dementia that are often characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction. Exercise training causes new mitochondria to grow in the muscles.  Mitochondria are fascinating, almost parasitic cells within our cells that now act as “power plants” that use oxygen and glucose to produce ATP, the energy currency of the cell.  Endurance gets better, since you are enabled to keep the muscles aerobically fuelled for longer.  By the way it is not just endurance training that does this, Gibala just this year has shown that sprint training also causes mitochondrial biogenesis.  An acute bout of high-intensity interval trainin...

A nice little video.  This ties in a lot with the material  that Todd has had  on pain , and with the stuff I've been thinking through on neuroplasticity. 

Golf Changes the Brain A mere 40 hours of golf training, by middle-aged novices, led to increases in gray matter in parts of the brain involved in visual processing and motor coordination, a new study has found. The experiment stood out, among other reasons, for the informal way test subjects were allowed to pursue the training—outside the lab, on their own schedule—and it reaffirmed the plasticity of the mature brain.  I am still finding the neuroplasticity work and its implications absolutely fascinating.  That is why I am trying to learn to juggle!   (There is a related idea here too - musicians have better hearing )

Todd Hargrove posted this amazing video the other day and I just wanted to call attention to it and the things that it teaches.  Todd's own material on learning how to move is definitely worth buying and learning from, taking some of these basic principles and influenced very much by Feldenkrais. Note that Todd didn't do this video - it was created by Irene Gutteridge, a Feldenkrais practitioner and filmmaker . In the session I had with Erwan Le Corre last year there was a section on rolling and perceiving your weight and points of contact with the ground.  All this is very MovNat .  Watching this I can see where many of the ideas in Becoming Bulletproof came from.  They are big on rolling and crawling as foundational moves which also have profound impact on the brain. More and more recently I am becoming fascinated by the brain, neuroplasticity and its role in our movement, health and perception.  There is more to come on this.

"Strength is a skill".  That has almost become a cliche, particularly around the kettlebell community, but there is much truth in this simple sentence.  I first same across this idea when Clarence Bass introduce Pavel's idea of synaptic facilitation , that so much of strength is neurological, an idea that Pavel expounded in his article Greasing the Groove (pdf) Of course this is related to the ideas of Z health too (check out the material here ) and Todd Hargrove had a great post the other day on the brain's impact on strength.  Linked to all of this I received a fascinating email this morning from Bill who often comments on the blog.  It explains his experience of how practice makes him stronger.  I'll post it all here and would be really interested in your comments of thoughts: Your recent articles on Z-Health and other neurological aspects of improving performance reminded me of an experiment I did about 6 months ago.  First a little background...

 The report that he is talking about is here by the way by the way, I wonder if neck packing works do to the arthokinetic reflex? mc has a post here that makes me think that that may be so The interview that I did with mc has a good overview of Z Health too

In the past I've posted a few things about exercise and brain health, not least the work of John Ratey , and his book Spark .   I can't remember if I've posted it but there is also the work of Kelly Lambert who looks tmovement in terms of addressing depression. Anyway, I saw this mentioned on Twitter the other day: Exercise Training Increases Mitochondrial Biogenesis in the Brain. Exercise training increases brain mitochondrial biogenesis which may have important implications, not only with regard to fatigue, but also with respect to various central nervous system diseases and age-related dementia that are often characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.

Paul Jaminet at the Perfect Health Diet has talked a bit about infection and the impact on the brain .  This is an interesting report of how: a small amount of exercise shields older animals from memory loss following a bacterial infection, according to a study in the August 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest moderate exercise may lead to several changes in the brain that boost its ability to protect itself during aging — a period of increased vulnerability. Here is the abstract We have previously found that healthy aged rats are more likely to suffer profound memory impairments following a severe bacterial infection than are younger adult rats. Such a peripheral challenge is capable of producing a neuroinflammatory response, and in the aged brain this response is exaggerated and prolonged. Normal aging primes, or sensitizes, microglia, and this appears to be the source of this amplified inflammatory response. Among the outcomes of this exaggera...

I think I've mentioned before the idea of brain maps .  mc started wrote about this a while ago and pointed me towards the book - The Body has a Mind of its Own There was a good discussion of the ideas at Paul's Perfect Health Diet blog too recently, with something from Todd Hargrove and a good follow up discussion It is also a topic on which the excellent Becoming Bulletproof is built.  Anyway, I spotted this interesting report on how brain maps - at least in rats - are pretty flat.  They are not good at estimating their position with respect to height.  Read more here Animal's brains are only roughly aware of how high-up they are in space, meaning that in terms of altitude the brain's 'map' of space is surprisingly flat, according to new research. In a study published online today in Nature Neuroscience, scientists studied cells in or near a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which forms the brain's map of space, to see whether they ...

I've pointed to material like this before - e.g. the post on Ratey's book Spark - but the post on Paul's Perfect Health Diet blog on joint mobility got me thinking about it again.   It is worth reading and I've put a few comments on the post There was a good review paper recently about the evidence for the relationships between physical activity and exercise and the brain and cognition.  The full paper is avalable .  Interesting stuff. It also links to the ideas of the excellent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own which I might have mentioned previously, a superb book that mc pointed me towards. I should also mention that Becoming Bulletproof provides a nice explanation of these ideas too.

I saw this ebook by Tim Anderson and Mike McNiff mentioned in a post by Dan John   I have great respect for Dan so I stumped up the $7 via Paypal and got myself a copy of Becoming Bulletproof.   Somes I get a bit fed up by the macho rhetoric that can be applied to training books - they want us all to be renegade....tactical.....warriors.....men among men......but in this case bulletproof just means resilient, maintaining function. I am very impressed .  It is a relatively quick read but there is a lot of material in here.  It ties in some ideas from several sources that I have pointed to over the years and binds them together around some simple concepts and movements. If you have followed some of the people and concepts that I have pointed to over the years you will recognise much of the ideas, but there were new things to me and the basic simple set of moves that they recommend are almost obvious given the conceptual framework that they build. There are el...

Here is an interesting one.  I've watched a couple of important people in my life decline markedly through various types of dementia recently.  It is really sad to see once vibrant intelligent people so limited by changes in their brains. Insulin Sensitivity as a Mediator of the Relationship Between BMI and Working Memory-Related Brain Activation This study has a simple conclusions:  obesity in middle age was related to alterations in brain activation during a cognitive challenge and this association appeared to be mediated by insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity again.  What can we do to maintain insulin sensitivity?  It is all the regular stuff - low carb/paleo diet, sensible exercise, adequate sleep, minimal chronic stress.....

This was interesting. I've pointed to similar things before - e.g. the post on Spark and the follow up one. moderate exercise – in this case walking at one's own pace for 40 minutes three times a week – can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks. The higher the connectivity, the better the performance on cognitive tasks, especially the ones we call executive control tasks – things like planning, scheduling, dealing with ambiguity, working memory and multitasking," Kramer said. These are the very skills that tend to decline with aging, he said. There is more in the report here and the full study (pdf) is available from the link below: Plasticity of brain networks in a randomized intervention trial of exercise training in older adults

Further to the Spark posts a few days ago, here is another study that exercise promotes brain health. This time it is not in mice (like this one was) but humans. Implication that training promotes brain health and could treat depression. Shame they didn't test resistance training. Endurance training enhances BDNF release from the human brain The circulating level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is reduced in patients with major depression and type-2 diabetes. Because acute exercise increases BDNF production in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex, we hypothesized that endurance training would enhance the release of BDNF from the human brain as detected from arterial and internal jugular venous blood samples. In a randomized controlled study, 12 healthy sedentary males carried out 3 mo of endurance training (n = 7) or served as controls (n = 5). Before and after the intervention, blood samples were obtained at rest and during exercise. At baseline, the training group ...

Maybe. It is one more reason to train anyway. My Dad has had a series of strokes recently and so I am interested in anything that might limit damage. Exercise Preconditioning Reduces Neuronal Apoptosis in Stroke by Up-regulating HSP-70 (HSP-72) and ERK 1/2. Exercise preconditioning induces neuroprotection after stroke......Our results indicate that exercise diminishes neuronal injury in stroke by up-regulating HSP-70 and ERK 1/2.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the book Spark that I had ordered, having read about it from Frank Forencich . Bill De Simone commented on the post and summarised the argument: the gist of his book is that running, swimming, etc. benefits creativity, concentration, mood, other brain aspects, more so than weight training and stretching, due to the increased blood flow to the brain. He doesn't devalue weight training/yoga/stretching, just draws a distinction between benefits. Increased heart rate alone, such as from blood pooling during weight training, isn't enough; there has to be the steady increased flow. I just saw this study reported which seems to support that position: In the first study to demonstrate a clear positive association between adolescent fitness and adult cognitive performance, Nancy Pedersen of the University of Southern California and colleagues in Sweden find that better cardiovascular health among teenage boys correlates to higher scores on a range of ...